Supreme Court Decisions to Shape Policy, Campaigns

Hawkings, David, Roll Call

As the justices bring this season's caseload to a close, they
have a pretty clear idea how the rest of this Supreme Court year
will play out. The rest of the country, however, will remain almost
entirely in the dark until the remaining decisions are unveiled over
the next six weeks.

The outcome in at least four of the most important disputes will
help shape both the policymaking and campaign agendas of Congress
through the midterm elections and beyond. But it's possible no
single ruling will have as much impact on the national political
climate as the pattern that emerges in how the cases get decided.

The members of the current court are getting a reputation for
being just as partisan and polarized as the politicians populating
the other two elected branches of government. New polling shows the
public is none too pleased with the Supreme Court's perception,
which is backed up by some pretty solid evidence, and people want
term limits for the justices in an effort to depoliticize the court.

So far this spring, two landmark cases at the intersection of
legislating and politics have been decided by the narrowest possible
5-4 split, with all the nominees of Republican presidents lining to
defeat the justices chosen by Democrats. That was the case in the
April's ruling against the longstanding cap on how much an
individual may donate to federal candidates in a given election
cycle, and in May's ruling in favor of sectarian prayers before
meetings of town councils and county boards nationwide.

And it was the same split in a third such case last summer, which
struck at the heart of the Voting Rights Act. The Republican-picked
majority (in descending seniority) was Chief Justice John G. Roberts
Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas
and Samuel A. Alito Jr. The Democratic-chosen minority was Justices
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena
Kagan.

Given the hot-button issues at stake, and the tenor of the
questioning at the oral arguments, there is reason to suspect that
several of the biggest decisions before the end of June will divide
along those same partisan lines.

Only the five members of the GOP-appointee bloc sounded
altogether ready to permit family-owned corporations to cite their
religious freedoms in declining to provide insurance coverage for
contraception, as generally required under the new employer mandate
of the Affordable Care Act. (Hobby Lobby, the main plaintiff in this
term's most important challenge to Obamacare, objects by holding up
a belief that some contraception methods amount to abortions.)

The same five justices also made plain they are skeptical of the
Obama administration's view that it has broad latitude under the law
to set emissions limits on greenhouse gases from power plants, even
though the numbers are nowhere mentioned in the Clean Air Act. The
four Democratic appointees, in contrast, appear aligned behind the
view that the EPA should have broad leeway in combating climate
change.

How the court comes down on the Hobby Lobby and EPA cases will
influence how the political parties shape two of their most
important messages -- on health care and environmental regulation --
before the midterm elections. …

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